by Reza Aslan
There was another, more practical advantage to centering the movement in Jerusalem. The yearly cycle of festivals and feasts brought thousands of Jews from across the empire directly to them. And unlike the Jews living in Jerusalem, who seem to have easily dismissed Jesus’s followers as uninformed at best, heretical at worst, the Diaspora Jews, who lived far from the sacred city and beyond the reach of the Temple, proved far more susceptible to the disciples’ message.
As small minorities living in large cosmopolitan centers like Antioch and Alexandria, these Diaspora Jews had become deeply acculturated to both Roman society and Greek ideas. Surrounded by a host of different races and religions, they tended to be more open to questioning Jewish beliefs and practices, even when it came to such basic matters as circumcision and dietary restrictions. Unlike their brethren in the Holy Land, Diaspora Jews spoke Greek, not Aramaic: Greek was the language of their thought processes, the language of their worship. They experienced the scriptures not in the original Hebrew but in a Greek translation (the Septuagint), which offered new and originative ways of expressing their faith, allowing them to more easily harmonize traditional biblical cosmology with Greek philosophy. Consider the Jewish scriptures that came out of the Diaspora. Books such as The Wisdom of Solomon, which anthropomorphizes Wisdom as a woman to be sought above all else, and Jesus Son of Sirach (commonly referred to as The Book of Ecclesiasticus) read more like Greek philosophical tracts than like Semitic scriptures.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Diaspora Jews were more receptive to the innovative interpretation of the scriptures being offered by Jesus’s followers. In fact, it did not take long for these Greek-speaking Jews to outnumber the original Aramaic-speaking followers of Jesus in Jerusalem. According to the book of Acts, the community was divided into two separate and distinct camps: the “Hebrews,” the term used by Acts to refer to the Jerusalem-based believers under the leadership of James and the apostles, and the “Hellenists,” those Jews who came from the Diaspora and who spoke Greek as their primary language (Acts 6:1).
It was not just language that separated the Hebrews from the Hellenists. The Hebrews were primarily peasants, farmers, and fishermen—transplants in Jerusalem from the Judean and Galilean countryside. The Hellenists were more sophisticated and urbane, better educated, and certainly wealthier, as evidenced by their ability to travel hundreds of kilometers to make pilgrimage at the Temple. It was, however, the division in language that would ultimately prove decisive in differentiating the two communities. The Hellenists, who worshipped Jesus in Greek, relied on a language that provided a vastly different set of symbols and metaphors than did either Aramaic or Hebrew. The difference in language gradually led to differences in doctrine, as the Hellenists began to meld their Greek-inspired worldviews with the Hebrews’ already idiosyncratic reading of the Jewish scriptures.
When conflict broke out between the two communities over the equal distribution of communal resources, the apostles designated seven leaders among the Hellenists to see to their own needs. Known as “the Seven,” these leaders are listed in the book of Acts as Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, Nicolaus (a Gentile convert from Antioch), and, of course, Stephen, whose death at the hands of an angry mob would make permanent the division between the Hebrews and Hellenists.
A wave of persecution followed Stephen’s death. The religious authorities, who until then seemed to have grudgingly tolerated the presence of Jesus’s followers in Jerusalem, were incensed by Stephen’s shockingly heretical words. It was bad enough to call a crucified peasant messiah; it was unforgivably blasphemous to call him God. In response, the authorities systematically expelled the Hellenists from Jerusalem, an act that, interestingly, did not seem to have been greatly opposed by the Hebrews. Indeed, the fact that the Jerusalem assembly continued to thrive under the shadow of the Temple for decades after Stephen’s death indicates that the Hebrews remained somewhat unaffected by the persecutions of the Hellenists. It was as though the priestly authorities did not consider the two groups to be related.
Meanwhile, the expelled Hellenists flooded back into the Diaspora. Armed with the message they had adopted from the Hebrews in Jerusalem, they began transmitting it, in Greek, to their fellow Diaspora Jews, those living in the Gentile cities of Ashdod and Caesarea, in the coastal regions of Syria-Palestine, in Cyprus and Phoenicia and Antioch, the city in which they were, for the first time, referred to as Christians (Acts 11:27). Little by little over the following decade, the Jewish sect founded by a group of rural Galileans morphed into a religion of urbanized Greek speakers. No longer bound by the confines of the Temple and the Jewish cult, the Hellenist preachers began to gradually shed Jesus’s message of its nationalistic concerns, transforming it into a universal calling that would be more appealing to those living in a Graeco-Roman milieu. In doing so, they unchained themselves from the strictures of Jewish law, until it ceased to have any primacy. Jesus did not come to fulfill the law, the Hellenists argued. He came to abolish it. Jesus’s condemnation was not of the priests who defiled the Temple with their wealth and hypocrisy. His condemnation was of the Temple itself.
Still, at this point, the Hellenists reserved their preaching solely for their fellow Jews, as Luke writes in the book of Acts: “They spoke the word to no one but the Jews” (Acts 11:19). This was still a primarily Jewish movement, one that blossomed through the theological experimentation that marked the Diaspora experience in the Roman Empire. But then a few among the Hellenists began sharing the message of Jesus with gentiles, “so that a great number of them became believers.” The gentile mission was not paramount—not yet. But the farther the Hellenists spread from Jerusalem and the heart of the Jesus movement, the more their focus shifted from an exclusively Jewish audience to a primarily gentile one. The more their focus shifted to converting gentiles, the more they allowed certain syncretistic elements borrowed from Greek gnosticism and Roman religions to creep into the movement. And the more the movement was shaped by these new “pagan” converts, the more forcefully it discarded its Jewish past for a Graeco-Roman future.
All of this was still many years away. It would not be until after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. that the mission to the Jews would be abandoned and Christianity transformed into a Romanized religion. Yet even at this early stage in the Jesus movement, the path toward gentile dominance was being set, though the tipping point would not come until a young Pharisee and Hellenistic Jew from Tarsus named Saul—the same Saul who had countenanced Stephen’s stoning for blasphemy—met the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus and became known forevermore as Paul.
Chapter Fourteen
Am I Not an Apostle?
Saul of Tarsus was still breathing threats and murder against the disciples when he left Jerusalem to find and punish the Hellenists who had fled to Damascus after Stephen’s stoning. Saul was not asked by the high priest to hunt down these followers of Jesus; he went of his own accord. An educated, Greek-speaking, Diaspora Jew and citizen of one of the wealthiest port cities in the Roman Empire, Saul was zealously devoted to the Temple and Torah. “Circumcised on the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews,” he writes of himself in a letter to the Philippians, “as to [knowledge of] the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:5–6).
It was while en route to Damascus that the young Pharisee had an ecstatic experience that would change everything for him, and for the faith he would adopt as his own. As he approached the city gates with his traveling companions, he was suddenly struck by a light from heaven flashing all around him. He fell to the ground in a heap. A voice said to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
“Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked.
The reply broke through the blinding white light, “I am Jesus.”
Struck blind by the vision, Saul made his way to Damascus, where he met a follower of Jesus na
med Ananias, who laid hands upon him and restored his sight. Immediately, something like scales dropped from Saul’s eyes and he was filled with the Holy Spirit. Right then and there, Saul was baptized into the Jesus movement. He changed his name to Paul and immediately began preaching the risen Jesus, not to his fellow Jews, but to the gentiles who had, up to this point, been more or less ignored by the movement’s chief missionaries.
The story of Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus is a bit of propagandistic legend created by the evangelist Luke; Paul himself never recounts the story of being blinded by the sight of Jesus. If the traditions can be believed, Luke was a young devotee of Paul: he is mentioned in two letters, Colossians and Timothy, commonly attributed to Paul but written long after his death. Luke wrote the book of Acts as a kind of eulogy to his former master some thirty to forty years after Paul had died. In fact, Acts is less an account of the apostles than it is a reverential biography of Paul; the apostles disappear from the book early on, serving as little more than the bridge between Jesus and Paul. In Luke’s reimagining, it is Paul—not James, nor Peter, nor John, nor any of the Twelve—who is the true successor to Jesus. The activity of the apostles in Jerusalem serves only as prelude to Paul’s preaching in the Diaspora.
Although Paul does not divulge any details about his conversion, he does repeatedly insist that he has witnessed the risen Jesus for himself, and that this experience has endowed him with the same apostolic authority as the Twelve. “Am I not an apostle?” Paul writes in defense of his credentials, which were frequently challenged by the mother assembly in Jerusalem. “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (1 Corinthians 9:1).
Paul may have considered himself an apostle, but it seems that few if any of the other movement leaders agreed. Not even Luke, Paul’s sycophant, whose writings betray a deliberate, if ahistorical, attempt to elevate his mentor’s status in the founding of the church, refers to Paul as an apostle. As far as Luke is concerned, there are only twelve apostles, one for each tribe of Israel, just as Jesus had intended. In recounting the story of how the remaining eleven apostles replaced Judas Iscariot with Matthias after Jesus’s death, Luke notes that the new recruit needed to be someone who “accompanied [the disciples] all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, starting with John’s baptism, right up to the day [Jesus] was taken from us” (Acts 1:21). Such a requirement would clearly have ruled out Paul, who converted to the movement around 37 C.E., nearly a decade after Jesus had died. But that does not deter Paul, who not only demands to be called an apostle—“even if I am not an apostle to others, at least I am to you,” he tells his beloved community in Corinth (1 Corinthians 9:2)—he insists he is far superior to all the other apostles.
“Are they Hebrews?” Paul writes of the apostles. “So am I! Are they Israelites? So am I! Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I! Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one (though it may be foolish to say so), with greater labors, more floggings, more imprisonments, and more often near death” (2 Corinthians 11:22–23). Paul holds particular contempt for the Jerusalem-based triumvirate of James, Peter, and John, whom he derides as the “so-called pillars of the church” (Galatians 2:9). “Whatever they are makes no difference to me,” he writes. “Those leaders contributed nothing to me” (Galatians 2:6). The apostles may have walked and talked with the living Jesus (or, as Paul dismissively calls him, “Jesus-in-the-flesh”). But Paul walks and talks with the divine Jesus: they have, according to Paul, conversations in which Jesus imparts secret instructions intended solely for his ears. The apostles may have been handpicked by Jesus as they toiled away on their fields or brought up their fishing nets. But Jesus chose Paul before he was born: he was, he tells the Galatians, called by Jesus into apostleship while still in his mother’s womb (Galatians 1:15). In other words, Paul does not consider himself the thirteenth apostle. He thinks he is the first apostle.
The claim of apostleship is an urgent one for Paul, as it was the only way to justify his entirely self-ascribed mission to the gentiles, which the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem appear not to have initially supported. Although there was a great deal of discussion among the apostles over how strictly the new community should adhere to the Law of Moses, with some advocating rigorous compliance and others taking a more moderate stance, there was little argument about whom the community was meant to serve: this was a Jewish movement intended for a Jewish audience. Even the Hellenists reserved their preaching mostly for the Jews. If a handful of gentiles decided to accept Jesus as messiah, so be it, as long as they submitted to circumcision and the law.
Yet, for Paul, there is no room whatsoever for debating the role of the Law of Moses in the new community. Not only does Paul reject the primacy of Jewish law, he refers to it as a “ministry of death, chiseled in letters on a stone tablet” that must be superseded by “a ministry of the Spirit come in glory” (2 Corinthians 3:7–8). He calls his fellow believers who continue to practice circumcision—the quintessential mark of the nation of Israel—“dogs and evildoers” who “mutilate the flesh” (Philippians 3:2). These are startling statements for a former Pharisee to make. But for Paul they reflect the truth about Jesus that he feels he alone recognizes, which is that “Christ is the end of the Torah” (Romans 10:4).
Paul’s breezy dismissal of the very foundation of Judaism was as shocking to the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem as it would have been to Jesus himself. After all, Jesus claimed to have come to fulfill the Law of Moses, not to abolish it. Far from rejecting the law, Jesus continually strove to expand and intensify it. Where the law commands, “thou shall not kill,” Jesus added, “if you are angry with your brother or sister you are liable to [the same] judgment” (Matthew 5:22). Where the law states, “thou shall not commit adultery,” Jesus extended it to include “everyone who looks at a woman with lust” (Matthew 5:28). Jesus may have disagreed with the scribes and scholars over the correct interpretation of the law, particularly when it came to such matters as the prohibition against working on the Sabbath. But he never rejected the law. On the contrary, Jesus warned that “whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19).
One would think that Jesus’s admonishment not to teach others to break the Law of Moses would have had some impact on Paul. But Paul seems totally unconcerned with anything “Jesus-in-the-flesh” may or may not have said. In fact, Paul shows no interest at all in the historical Jesus. There is almost no trace of Jesus of Nazareth in any of his letters. With the exception of the crucifixion and the Last Supper, which he transforms from a narrative into a liturgical formula, Paul does not narrate a single event from Jesus’s life. Nor does Paul ever actually quote Jesus’s words (again, with the exception of his rendering of the Eucharistic formula: “This is my body …”). Actually, Paul sometimes directly contradicts Jesus. Compare what Paul writes in his epistle to the Romans—“everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13)—to what Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord Lord’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 7:21).
Paul’s lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care. He repeatedly boasts that he has not learned about Jesus either from the apostles or from anyone else who may have known him. “But when it pleased God … to reveal his son to me, so that I might preach him to the gentiles, I did not confer with anyone, nor did I go up to Jerusalem [to ask permission of] the apostles before me,” Paul boasts. “Instead, I went directly to Arabia, and then again to Damascus” (Galatians 1:15–17).
Only after three years of preaching a message that Paul insists he received not from any human being (by which he quite obviously means James and the apostles), but directly from Jesus, did he deign to visit
the men and women in Jerusalem who had actually known the man Paul professed as Lord (Galatians 1:12).
Why does Paul go to such lengths not only to break free from the authority of the leaders in Jerusalem, but to denigrate and dismiss them as irrelevant or worse? Because Paul’s views about Jesus are so extreme, so beyond the pale of acceptable Jewish thought, that only by claiming that they come directly from Jesus himself could he possibly get away with preaching them. What Paul offers in his letters is not, as some of his contemporary defenders maintain, merely an alternative take on Jewish spirituality. Paul, instead, advances an altogether new doctrine that would have been utterly unrecognizable to the person upon whom he claims it is based. For it was Paul who solved the disciples’ dilemma of reconciling Jesus’s shameful death on the cross with the messianic expectations of the Jews, by simply discarding those expectations and transforming Jesus into a completely new creature, one that seems almost wholly of his own making: Christ.
